The Oxford Handbook on Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics

(Oxford University Press, 2020)

By Michael J. Bosia, Sandra M. McEvoy, and Momin Rahman

This Handbook contains chapters on the struggles for LGBT rights and the security of sexual and gender minorities around the world, with a substantial number of contributions from the Global South. It contextualizes the regional case studies within relevant theoretical frameworks from the sociology of sexualities, critical race studies, postcolonialism, indigenous theories, social movement theory, and international relations theory. Therefore, it provides readers with up-to-date empirical material as well as various ways of assessing the analytical significance, commonalities, and differences of global LGBT politics. As such, the chapters combine to present an overall interdisciplinary and critical perspective on contemporary LGBT politics.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice

(Routledge, 2019)

Edited By Ranjini Srikanth and Elora Halim Chowdhury

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice is an edited collection that brings together analyses of human rights work from multiple disciplines. Within the academic sphere, this book will garner interest from scholars who are invested in human rights as a field of study, as well as those who research, and are engaged in, the praxis of human rights.

Referring to the historical and cross-cultural study of human rights, the volume engages with disciplinary debates in political philosophy, gender and women’s studies, Global South/Third World studies, international relations, psychology, and anthropology. At the same time, the authors employ diverse methodologies including oral history, theoretical and discourse analysis, ethnography, and literary and cinema studies. Within the field of human rights studies, this book attends to the critical academic gap on interdisciplinary and praxis-based approaches to the field, as opposed to a predominantly legalistic focus, drawing from case studies from a wide range of contexts in the Global South, including Bangladesh, Colombia, Haiti, India, Mexico, Palestine, and Sudan, as well as from Australia and the United States in the Global North.

For students who will go on to become researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and activists, this collection of essays will demonstrate the multifaceted landscape of human rights and the multiple forces (philosophical, political, cultural, economic, historical) that affect it.

Economic and Social Rights in a Neoliberal World

(Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Edited By Gillian MacNaughton and Diane F. Frey

The rise of neoliberal policy and practice simultaneous to the growing recognition of economic and social rights presents a puzzle. Can the rights to food, water, health education, decent work, social security and the benefits of science prevail against market fundamentalism? Economic and Social Rights in a Neoliberal World is about the potential of these rights to contest the adverse impacts of neoliberal policy and practice on human wellbeing. Cutting across several lines of human rights literature, the chapters address norm development, court decision making, policymaking, advocacy, measurement and social mobilization. The analyses reveal that neoliberalism infiltrates management practices, changes international policy goals, flattens public school curriculum and distorts the outputs of UN human rights treaty bodies. Are economic and social rights successful in challenging neoliberalism, are they simply marginalized or are they co-opted and incorporated into neoliberal frameworks? This multidisciplinary work by a geographically diverse group of scholars and practitioners begins to address these questions.

Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora

(Berghahn Books, 2013)

By Ping-Ann Addo

Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation— fonua—which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the “multi-territorial nation,” the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity. The globalized nation the women build through gifting their barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily involve commodities. Focusing on first-generation Tongans in New Zealand and the relationships they forge across generations and throughout the diaspora, the book examines how these communities centralize the diaspora by innovating and adapting traditional cultural forms in unprecedented ways.